REVIEWS & ARTICLES
PRESS
5th June 2022 – New York Times – Review – (The Colony) | CLICK HERE
27th February 2022 – The Observer – Review – (The Colony) | CLICK HERE
25th February 2022 – The Guardian – Review – (The Colony) | CLICK HERE
23rd February 2022 – Publishers Weekly – Review – (The Colony) | CLICK HERE
19th February 2022 – Canberra Times and Inverell Times – Review – (The Colony) | CLICK HERE
14th February 2022 – Writing.ie – Article – ‘Writing about Art: The Colony by Audrey Magee’ | CLICK HERE
4th February 2022 – Times Literary Supplement – Article – ‘Joyce and the Irish Language’ | CLICK HERE
4th February 2022 – The London Magazine – Article – ‘Does Interior Monologue have a National Identity?’ | CLICK HERE
30th January 2022 – Irish Independent – Review – (The Colony) | CLICK HERE
29th January 2022 – The Sunday Times – Review – (The Colony) | CLICK HERE
* * *
“This intelligent, unusual novel will surely be shortlisted for the Booker. It’s the summer of 1979: Lloyd, an insufferable, arrogant English artist, has gone to a tiny island off the west coast of Ireland.
He wants to paint in peace. Then comes another stranger: JP Masson is a French linguist on a campaign to save the Irish language, which he pursues with a tiresome zeal, even if the locals don’t seem to care that much. Masson sees Lloyd as a representative of the enemy English. The island is small, their egos are large. And caught in the middle are four generations of the poor, rural family who host them.”
– ‘The Colony’ has been selected by The Times as one of the Best Books to Read This Summer –
THE TIMES
“The story of art and identity is told in beautiful and colourful prose, often verging on the poetic. Magee has written a gorgeous and powerful novel that will stick with you.”
Press Association
“Intelligent and provocative… What a relief it is to find a novel that treats the reader as a grown-up, that is fresh without chasing literary fashion, provocative but not shouty, and idiosyncratic but fully satisfying from the strange comedy of its opening pages to its decisive conclusion… The Colony contains multitudes — on families, on men and women, on rural communities — with much of it just visible on the surface, like the flicker of a smile or a shark in the water.”
THE TIMES
“Austere and stark… a story about language and identity, about art, oppression, freedom and colonialism. The Colony is a novel about big, important things.”
Financial Times
“Magee is in control of every marvellous word. Her descriptions of a beautiful stretch of land within a beautiful but treacherous ocean are as dazzling as the sun-speckled glints on the ocean itself.”
The Sunday Independent
“The Colony is a novel of outstanding resonance, with a portray of language in a post-colonial landscape that is both masterful and subtle.”
The Sunday Business Post
“Magee’s involving and original novel considers questions of imperialism, ownership, power and exploitation on both a grand scale and an intimate one, obliquely and head-on . . . there is droll humour, too, and the whole is animated by her characters’ often entertaining back-and-forth.”
Daily Mail
“The Colony offers beguiling insights into what it means to be the colonised and the coloniser and is a subtle portrait of character and place . . . beyond this, Magee’s delicate transporting novel is an impressive celebration of the need for connection.”
Independent, Books of the Month
WRITERS
“The Colony: so brilliant in its quiet tragedy, so revealing in its precision. It haunts me.”
TSITSI DANGAREMBGA, author of ‘This Mournable Body’
“The Colony is a vivid and memorable book about art, land and language, love and sex, youth and age. Big ideas tread lightly through Audrey Magee’s strong prose.”
SARAH MOSS, author of ‘The Fell’
“Audrey Magee has written a lyrical, rich, and emotionally powerful novel that artfully weaves a sense of dislocation and isolation with the burdens of history and imperialism. The Colony comes alive like a brooding and beautiful canvas painted off the Irish coast.”
DOMINIC SMITH, author of ‘The Last Painting of Sara de Vos’
“The Colony is a brilliant novel, a subtle and thoughtfully calibrated commentary about the nature and balance of power between classes, cultures, genders. There is violence here, but, most impressively, Audrey Magee captures that more insidious cruelty—the kind masked as protection, as manners.”
MARY BETH KEANE, author of ‘Ask Again, Yes’
“A careful interrogation, The Colony expertly explores the mutability of language and art, the triumphs and failures inherent to the process of creation and preservation.”
RAVEN LEILANI, author of ‘Luster’
“The Colony is brimming with ideas about identity and soul; a canny, challenging, and never less than engrossing read.”
LISA MCINERNEY, author of ‘The Rules of Revelation’
TV & VIDEO
* * *
RADIO & PODCASTS
* * *
27th February 2022 – BBC Radio 4 Open Book – (The Colony) – Interview | CLICK HERE
8th February 2022 – RTE – (The Colony) – Review on Arena | CLICK HERE
6th February 2022 – RTE – (The Colony) – Interview with Miriam O’Callaghan | CLICK HERE
4th February 2022 – Burning Books Podcast – (The Colony) | CLICK HERE
4th February 2022 – The Times Literary Supplement – Interview on Joyce and the Irish language | CLICK HERE